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This metaphor is not perfect, however. For example, a large number of customers will buy compute systems that can be assembled into larger-scale systems. In other words, the metaphor breaks because the larger-scale customer is buying a semi truck made up of a whole bunch of Toyota Camrys with their steering, throttle, and brake systems tied together. A converged environment is fractal in a way vehicles never were…components are assembled into “pods” (a term I hate), which then may be assembled into a greater system.

Virtualization, however, is a little like standardizing the driving controls on automobiles, allowing the same human to operate a wide variety of vehicles. In the automotive world, such standardization allows vehicle manufacturers to build complete, operationally ready “systems” to meet the demands of numerous drivers. The vast majority of automobile buyers haven’t built their own cars for well over three quarters of a century now.

Simply having a uniform (or near-uniform) software layer between the physical infrastructure and your compute workloads means you can begin to assemble a homogeneous physical infrastructure to support a heterogeneous abstract IT environment.

This is not a spiel for any one vendor or even for a group of competitive vendors. Instead, focus on what this evolution means to the way you will buy and operate enterprise computing equipment in the coming years. While the highly customized computing systems of our siloed past meant buying “pieces/parts” was the logical way to go, its been a little like buying a
car by getting the engine from Honda, the chassis from Ford, and the wheels from Costco. You could probably build a pretty decent ride, assuming you could get it all to work together.

If you begin with the premise that the abstraction of data center resources into software representations (such as virtual machines) decouples IT workloads from the physical systems they rely on, then it makes sense to reconsider the way you buy and build your data centers.

If you haven’t thought yet about how virtualization changes the very nature of the data center, I recommend doing so now. Some form of unified computing and/or cloud computing is in your future, and will have the effect of reforming your perceptions of how to build and operate data centers.

(Credit:
CNET News)

The barriers between server, storage, and network administrators are going to quickly blur, and in 10 years or so, data center infrastructure operations will be the purview of a few hardware repair specialists, software developers themselves, and the strategic role of infrastructure architecture. Enterprise and solutions architects will design the virtual configurations of application containers, and the linkages between them.

Furthermore, the standardization of data center “parts” over time made custom assembly increasingly easy to do, keeping this approach cost effective. However, assembling the parts into a whole took significant expertise from a variety of skill sets. Even basic distributed application delivery required some pretty deep knowledge of OS, network, and storage terminology and operations to succeed.

No more trying to figure out which servers have storage area networking and which have local disk…they all can have both–making it much easier to reuse the physical system for workloads that require either one.

Those not finding such next-generation systems cost effective will likely migrate to external cloud environments that themselves use these concepts to deliver service. In fact, in terms of pure numbers, that may be the way a majority of companies choose to go. Many cloud experts note, however, that the technicians doing so will be developers, not system administrators, which again is a change in most data center cultures. More on that later.

The unit of procurement for large installations, however, will almost certainly be the “pod.” In that context, adding capacity one server or disk at a time starts to make little sense. In my opinion, this means that concerns about who is entering the server, storage, or network market mean less than identifying those who are entering the unified computing market.

The result is that the role of tactical system administrator, specializing in one data center technology and reacting to trouble tickets as fast as they come in, will fade away. CIOs will expect their administrators not to fix the data center as fast as it breaks, but to determine the policies that allow automation systems to keep the data center operational, as well as to recommend hardware and software that will enforce those policies. In fact, this is already happening in Web applications, as the term “Web operator” increasingly defines a “jack of all trades” type of administrator.

No more adding a unique network card to each server to support a shared management plane, just to find it locks you into that management architecture long after something better comes along.

There is one other interesting side effect of virtualization and automation, which I wrote about in a Strategic News Service Special Letter earlier this week, and re-posted on Infrastructure 2.0. Data center culture is going to be profoundly changed.

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No more custom-tailoring your systems for each application, only to find those systems difficult to alter to either meet the needs of a new workload or the changing needs of the existing one.

At the same time, vehicle manufacturers differentiate based on aesthetics (aka “user experience”), features, and price points. This gives us a variety of choices in the vehicle market. I expect the new generation of data center systems to move in the same direction: systems will share standardized ways of hosting workloads, but vary in terms of management features, performance capabilities, and total cost of ownership.

Creating new stations from artists or songs will add a lot to the capability and usefulness of this app as well. The new cover-flow view for song history behaves almost exactly like Apple’s. The album covers flip over to reveal information on the artist and why that song was played. One annoyance here is that you cannot bookmark or purchase songs from this view. I suspect that this is an easily correctable issue.

While this update isn’t anything revolutionary, it certainly rounds out the cool features in the app, like embedded iTunes purchasing. With Tuesday’s Macworld announcement of iTunes downloads, now being possible over 3G, this could prove to be a very useful feature.

The 2.0 update for Pandora improves upon an already killer and must-have application for the iPhone. It’s available in the iTunes store.

New features in this release include a progress bar for songs (finally!), 30-second previews for bookmarked songs, the ability to create a new station from a song or artist, artist information, cover-flow view for song history, and some sharing features.

As if being the No. 1 free
iPhone app of 2008 wasn’t enough for Pandora, it has launched version 2.0 of its app just six days into 2009.

Sega’s The House of the Dead: Overkill for the
Nintendo Wii console has broken into the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition for the most swearing in a video game, with a whopping 189 uses of the f-word.

“It is a dubious honor to receive such an accolade working in an industry where so often, the fruits of your labors are derided and dismissed for being puerile or irresponsible,” said Jonathan Burroughs, the game’s writer. “But in the case of House Of The Dead: Overkill, a little puerility was the order of business. Parodying the profane excess of grindhouse cinema was Headstrong’s objective, and I am flattered that this record acknowledges that we not only rose to that challenge, but entirely exceeded it.”

Clearly, this game is geared toward an adult audience, though you probably don’t want to show your grandmother how to play the Nintendo Wii with House of The Dead as your example game.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom

(Credit: Headstrong Games)

Winner of most profane video game

Thanks to a new agreement with pizza giant Domino’s, owners of TiVo set-top boxes can now order food from the chain directly through their televisions, and even track delivery time so they know just when the pizza guy will be showing up to bring them a nice, tasty treat.

One thing you can’t do: pay for the pizza through TiVo. That has to be done in cash when the pizza guy shows up.

“This is the first time in history that the ‘on-demand’ generation will be able to fully experience couch commerce by ordering pizza directly through their television set,” Rob Weisberg, Domino’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement. “You’ll see a television ad for Domino’s, and you’ll click, ‘I want it’ through your remote. In about 30 minutes, your pizza will show up at your door.” And then you won’t just be a couch potato, you’ll be a Digital Age couch potato.

Here’s the deal: when a Domino’s ad or product placement shows up, TiVo users can click through with their remote controls to order pizza, or can access an on-demand ordering screen through a TiVo menu. It’s similar in theory to the deals that TiVo has with Fandango for movie ticket ordering or with Amazon.com for ordering products related to TV shows, except that you get a pizza.

Oh, boy.

(Credit:
Domino’s)

Sony should be commended for its ability to bring the PSP to the mainstream and become a major player in the handheld market, which Nintendo has historically dominated without fear of competition. But now that Sony has secured a foothold, the company can capitalize on its success and use it as a building block for the future.

I’ve been tough on Sony over the past year for the mistakes I think it has committed with the Playstation 3. I’m a firm believer that Sony should bring the price of its console down and drop the price of Blu-ray players to make its format more appealing to consumers.

But as the war continues to be waged and each company in the market needs to find the single element that will appeal to gamers, Sony may have the upper hand. With the help of the PSP and its strong sales figures that will beat Sony’s best estimates this year, the company is sitting on what could become its key to the future–the gateway to bigger and better things.

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But just because I believe that, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t any hope for Sony to turn things around. And I still believe that there’s no debating that the Playstation 3 is probably one of the most capable devices on the market. But if Sony really wants to reach a position of dominance in the video game industry again and make people realize that it’s offering a fine alternative to other products in the market, it needs to tie its future to the PSP.

Now, there are some titles on the PSP that employ some basic features that can be combined with your PS3. But so far, many of those options have been relatively simple and haven’t had the kind of integration that would make the vast majority of PSP owners want to own a Playstation 3. Sure, a rear-view mirror might appeal to some, but in order to coax more people to buy a Playstation 3, Sony needs to make the connection between its PSP and PS3 more compelling.

Why the PSP? It’s simple: Sony’s handheld is an unbridled success that has caught some people off-guard. In the handheld market, it’s extremely difficult for other companies besides Nintendo to gain a foothold. But in just a few short years, the PSP has been able to persevere through its rough start and become one of the most popular devices on the market.

Realizing that, Sony needs to make the PSP a central focus in its strategy going forward. If the company won’t drop the price of the Playstation 3, the best way to bring more people to its console is to use the PSP’s huge installed base to its advantage.

With that many PSPs in the wild, Sony can tap into a huge market of people from across the globe that don’t necessarily own a
PS3 and haven’t felt the need to own the console yet. By using Apple’s patented convergence plan that brings together its different devices, Sony can turn PSP owners into PS3 owners in a flash.

Think of it this way: the PSP caters to an audience that Sony may have not appealed to yet with the Playstation 3. But by making the connection between both devices much closer, kids will be asking their parents for a Playstation 3 instead of other consoles because of their desire to have the ability to enhance their overall gaming experience with both devices in-hand. And as sales rise because of the PSP, Blu-ray sales may hit a level that’s far more tenable for future growth.

Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t the ability to take any game from the PS3 to the PSP and back to the PS3 be the killer feature that would put Sony back on top? Or what about the option to switch between PSP and PS3 in-game to make the experience more interactive? As far as I can tell, the possibilities of using the PSP with the PS3 are endless.

When you compare Sony’s sales numbers, it becomes abundantly clear why the PSP is its key to the future. According to sales figures derived from NPD, Sony has sold about 16.5 million Playstation 3 consoles since its release and 39.57 million PSPs since that device’s release. And although that figure isn’t quite as high as Nintendo’s 84.6 million DS units sold, it’s a major number that we shouldn’t overlook.

The video game console market is a hotly contested environment that isn’t nearly as easy to dominate as it once was. When Nintendo changed the way games are played, Sony and Microsoft were caught off-guard and now need to catch up. Microsoft can rely on online gaming and a lower price to bring about change and Sony has relied on a fine library of games and Blu-ray.

I have no idea how much this video cost Barclays or how they measured ROI on this effort. I do know, however, that protecting confidential data is a huge problem and employee training is an important part of any solution. If the results at Barclays are any indication, more organizations should marry serious security training efforts with a bit more shtick.

So what’s the problem? Some organizations minimize this task and provide only generic training. In some firms, users are not accountable for attending training classes or reading materials. Finally, some organizations provide security training that is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Let’s face it, security professionals tend to be pretty techie and the concepts can be complex. I’ve seen too many instances where security trainers lose the audience on the first slide of their presentation.

When I do end user security training, I am a firm believer in making it as entertaining as I can. I try to mix current events, comedy, and every day examples into my act to keep people engaged. I’m not the only one to add a little show business to security training. After a recent blog, I got an e-mail from the creative director of a communications firm in the UK. He sent me this link to a video the company produced for Barclays Bank to encourage employees to view a security training page posted by the internal risk management team. Funny stuff (reminded me of the British version of “The Office”), and apparently traffic to the page increased substantially over the next year.

In a recent blog I discussed a bit of rather alarming ESG Research data. When asked to define the most important processes related to confidential data security, 47 percent of North American and Western European security professionals point to, “communicating and training employees on confidential data security policies.” Unfortunately, it turns out that many large organizations aren’t very good confidential data security policy communicators or trainers–28 percent of security professionals rate their organization as “fair” or “poor” in this area.

MySpace plans to integrate Google Gears with its platform, according to the social network’s co-founder Chris DeWolfe. Users will be able to access their profiles offline using the Google Gears APIs, but the feature won’t be available for a few months.

He did talk about the new music service launching this month that will partner with the major labels, offer free streaming, and include some original content from its audience of 120 million members. DeWolfe said that MySpace is very focused on making the new service a success, with more than 70 people, including top MySpace management, working on the project. He was asked if Amazon was providing the downloading capabilities, but declined to answer. MySpace has a strong music foundation, and may be able to make some inroads into the Apple/iTunes territory.

Michael Arrington talks with MySpace's Chris DeWolfe at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET)

DeWolfe was fielding a few questions in an interview at the TechCrunch50 event in San Francisco with co-host Mike Arrington, who started off the interrogation by asking DeWolfe if he was dating Paris Hilton. The gentlemanly DeWolfe declined to answer the question.

“As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation, and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they’re looking for, we are currently showing text ads on the search results pages for Picasa Web Albums. This experiment is only visible to a small number of U.S.-based users,” the company said in a statement. The ad experiment has been running for “a few weeks,” Google said.

(Via the unofficial Google Operating System blog.)

Google, trying to increase profitability, has been spreading ads to sites that previously lacked them. Among them: Google Finance, Google News, image search, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

Google is showing ads on search results at its Picasa photo-sharing site. (Click to enlarge.)

Pages for photos and galleries doesn’t show ads, but search results do for some people. The ads are located in a yellow-tinted “sponsored links” section above the photo results for some in the United States. (See screenshot below.)

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google has begun showing ads on search results at its Picasa site for sharing photos, part of its gradual expansion of advertising across its numerous Web properties.

(Credit:
Cisco)

Kost repeatedly mentioned the increasingly blurred lines between business use and personal use and how some of that is OK. But long-term personal use of a corporate asset could become a problem.

The report also cited the growing risks of portable hard drives as opposed to lost or stolen laptops. One in three IT professionals said USB drives (including iPods) were their top concern, more so than e-mail (23 percent), lost devices (19 percent), and verbal communications with outsiders (8 percent).

IT professionals surveyed worldwide said they think their own employees pose a more serious security threat than outsiders, and often it’s because of personal use of corporate assets, according to the third and final report based on a 2008 survey (PDF) commissioned by Cisco Systems and released Wednesday.

The first report on cultural attitudes toward security was released in October.

“Say they have their iTunes library on the device they use for work, now they have to give up their work device, and they have to figure out what to do.” In the study, less than 10 percent of the employees did keep their work devices. Of those who did, 60 percent said it was because there were personal files on the device. “It’s not malicious,” Kost said, “it may just be the only computer in the household.”

The Cisco study was conducted in late July through early August by InsightExpress, a U.S.-based market research firm, and involved more than 2,000 employees and information technology professionals. Specifically, the study surveyed 1,000 employees and 1,000 IT professionals from various industries and company sizes in 10 countries.

Surprisingly, 1 in 10 end users in the Cisco survey admitted stealing data or devices and then selling them for profit, or knowing of co-workers who have done so.

“There’s either a negligent behavior or careless recklessness in which they handle data maybe because they didn’t realize it was there or maybe there’s an education gap,” Fred Kost, director of security solutions for Cisco, told CNET News in an interview. “The storage capacity of some of these devices and the types of access they have access to is becoming a critical issue for companies.”

(Credit:
Cisco)

Yet there are also nonmalicious reasons to explain how corporate data gets leaked into the wild.

Other findings include: One in five Brazilian IT professionals said they think their employees are less diligent around protecting corporate data. And in China and in India, IT professionals are most concerned with data thefts through the use of USB devices including thumb drives and iPods in the workplace.

“If you think about the device leaving the enterprise, going into their home environment, the personal environment, maybe letting their children use it; that puts the corporate data at risk,” said Kost. He said data leakage could occur when the kids are using the device to surf some Web 2.0 application. “And what about the end of life, when they go to give the device up on one of the e-waste recycling days? There’s another chance for somebody to get that corporate data.”

Of those who kept a work device, Cisco found that 60 percent did so for personal needs.

According to the survey, IT professionals said about 10 percent of their employees are losing corporate devices like laptops and USB drives with valuable data more than once a year.

A Cisco survey found that of employees who have lost company-issued devices or have had them stolen, one in four employees have done so more than once within the past year.